Question

I was wondering if anyone had tips on how to completely remove a python installation form Mac OSX (10.5.8) … including virtual environments and its related binaries. Over the past few years I’ve completely messed up the installed site-packages, virtual-environments, etc. and the only way I can see to fix it is to just uninstall everything and re-install.

I’d like to completely re-do everything and use virtualenv, pip, etc. from the beginning.

On the other hand if anyone knows a way to do this without removing python and re-installing I’d be happy to here about it.

Thanks,

Will

Answer 1

Just for everyone else’s reference. I found this in the Python documentation here:

Mac OS X 10.5 comes with Python 2.5.1 pre-installed by Apple. If you wish, you are invited to install the
most recent version of Python from the
Python website
(http://www.python.org). A current
“universal binary” build of Python,
which runs natively on the Mac’s new
Intel and legacy PPC CPU’s, is
available there.

What you get after installing is a
number of things:

* A MacPython 2.5 folder in your Applications folder. In here you find

IDLE, the development environment that
is a standard part of official Python
distributions; PythonLauncher, which
handles double-clicking Python scripts
from the Finder; and the “Build
Applet” tool, which allows you to
package Python scripts as standalone
applications on your system.
* A framework /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework,
which includes the Python executable
and libraries. The installer adds this
location to your shell path. To
uninstall MacPython, you can simply
remove these three things. A symlink
to the Python executable is placed in
/usr/local/bin/.

I removed these and the virtualenv directories. Then I re-installed everything and its working fine now.